There is something terribly trashy about the fourth chapter of the John Wick saga. Trashy and self-obsessed, it is the action avatar of Doordarshan’s Chitrahaar which played uninterrupted song sequences from Hindi films for 30 minutes and was great fun to watch.
John Wick 4, is nothing but a jamboree of fusion stunts (martial arts, taekwondo, wrestling, free-hand boxing) beaded together in a hot steamy bloodbath, punctuated by bouts of conversation where self-important men in suits and tuxedos seem to be saying something important about mortality, when in fact they are nothing but a bunch of unschooled power-drunk goons in clothes robbed from boutiques who never went to finishing school because they always thought they knew what it went: a school that teach you to finish off your adversaries. ALSO READ | John Wick: Chapter 4: Is This The Last Film For Baba Yaga? Here’s How The Story Of Beloved Assassin Ends-READ BELOW
And trust me, they are bad at it: these guys who kill without counting, fire at Mr Wick (so-called because I presume he never burns out even when the oil is dried up) point bank and miss him each time. If the same happened in a Bollywood film we’d say it is asinine. Here the audience feels it is ‘surreal’ when in reality it is nothing of the sort.
Screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Finch seem to have written purely by numbers. The headcount is so high and so senseless, you wonder, is this killing spree actually entertaining global audiences? Or are they responding reflexively to the gruesome cheerless stimuli?
For a franchise entertainer John Wick Chapter 4 is inexplicably humourless, unless you think a trained homicidal dog peeing on his victim after killing it, is funny (audiences around me were laughing, probably to hide their embarrassment).
In one sequence shot on the never-ending steps of a serpentine park, John (dear dear John) rolls down from the top right to the bottom….thud thud thud thud….Maybe a few thuds less would have reduced the excruciatingly lengthy playing time.
Watching assassins of various races slitting throats and dodging bullets for three hours can prove less than entertaining unless you are a sucker for grievous self-injury. In one sequence, the interesting Swedish actor Bill Skarsgad—we could say he is the Swedish after the main very very coarse course—plunges a knife into poor Shamier Anderson’s hand and gives him two options: either pull the knife out or drag your hand out of the knife. The first option is supposed to prove that Shamier playing a killer poetically named Tracker with a killer dog, cares only for himself, and the second option proves he cares for the larger cause….to get John Wick.
Just why it is so difficult for such super-skilled assassins to do something as elementary as kill John Wick and put humanity out of misery, is unclear to me. I am ready to pay any amount to anyone who can explain why Wick is so slippery to his purported assassins, why Keanu Reeves looks like a tarot card reader in an invisible tent all through, and most important of all, why the series needed Chapter 4 when 3 was more than enough, thank you.
No amount of sanguinary excesses on the streets of Paris can quench the growing feeling that this film has nothing to say. The characters should have just kept quiet and let all the mutilating action do all the talking.
There are two types of actors in John Wick Chapter 2: the seasoned troupers (Ian McShane for instance, who seems to have gotten himself a new set of teeth since we last saw him) who try hard to look like bad actors, and others who don’t try at all. ALSO READ | John Wick: Chapter 4: Is This The Last Film For Baba Yaga? Here’s How The Story Of Beloved Assassin Ends-READ BELOW
Donnie Yen plays a blind assassin who can shoot straight at his victims. Even he misses Mr Wick each time. Immortality in a pit of excreta.
Rating: 2/5 (**)
Image Source: SpotboyE